The Magpie Salute's High Water II: tight gospel boogie and brothel-house piano

The return of Rich Robinson’s high flying birds The Magpie Salute, with second album High Water II

The Magpie Salute: High Water II
(Image: © The Magpie Salute)

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Siblings: you can’t live with ’em, you can’t chop off their heads and boil them in tar. So former Black Crowes guitarist Rich Robinson instead decided to stick one to his gobshite elder brother and ex-bandmate-turned-antagonist Chris Robinson by forming a band that does pretty much the same job without him. 

High Water II was recorded in the same sessions that produced The Magpie Salute’s debut album, High Water I (duh!), though like that record it could easily have been laid down at any point during the Crowes’ 90s heyday – or 25 years before that. 

If the tight gospel boogie and brothel-house piano of Gimme Something sound kind of familiar, well, it’s not as if Robinson’s original band were brimming with originality.

Chris Robinson has snarkily called The Magpie Salute “a Black Crowes tribute act”, which is both on the nose and the best compliment he can pay them.

High Water II isn’t The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion, but it might just be By Your Side. In the absence of anything else, we’ll take it.

The Magpie Salute: High Water II
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The Magpie Salute: High Water II
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I wanted High Water l to introduce us to the world and the world to us. With High Water II I wanted to get a little deeper. To take people places they may not have expected to go" - Rich Robinson

Dave Everley

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.